Researchers Cripple PushDo Botnet

A team of professors and PhD students at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Germany's Ruhr-University Bochum have managed to cripple the PushDo botnet, according to V3.co.uk.

The researchers were looking into spam distribution. They matched the malware discovered against the free databases maintained by Anubis, identifying 30 command and control servers used by the PushDo botnet. The team notified the hosting companies, which resulted in 20 of the 30 servers being shut down.

Phil Hay, lead security researcher at M86, says:

This coordinated takedown has had an immediate impact on Pushdo's spam output.